A mirror cracked across my mind
Shards of you I cannot find
They cut my breath they cut my name
The night whispers lies in my ear
I chase shadows but you’re not here.

Keep Shelly in Athens

The Polite Lie

I thought I missed you.

It would have been convenient if I did, because missing someone is a clean kind of feeling. It has structure. It makes sense to other people. You can sit with it in public without having to explain yourself, quietly holding a coffee you’re not really drinking, staring out of a window as if something meaningful might arrive if you give it enough time.

For a moment, I leaned into that version of the story. It felt appropriate. Familiar in a socially acceptable way. Missing you would have suggested depth, maybe even a kind of emotional credibility—like I had experienced something significant and was now processing it properly.

People understand that. They respect it.

But the longer I sat there, the clearer it became that this wasn’t what was happening.

I don’t miss you.

What I miss is far less impressive.

I miss being an idiot.

Not in a dramatic or self-destructive sense, and not the kind people like to romanticise after the fact. Just the quieter version—the everyday kind. The one that moves through situations with mild confidence and no follow-up questions, trusting whatever it feels without needing to verify it.

Back then, things were simpler in a way that feels almost suspicious now. You could feel something and accept it at face value. You could notice something slightly off and decide, almost instinctively, that it wasn’t worth looking at too closely. You could stay in something longer than you should, not because you didn’t understand what was happening, but because you had no real interest in dissecting it.

There was an ease to that. A quiet efficiency. No commentary, no pattern recognition, no internal voice pointing out that you’ve seen this before and it didn’t end particularly well.

I didn’t know better, and more importantly—

I didn’t need to.

Momentum as a Lifestyle

Looking back, I didn’t really stop long enough to have a system.

That was the system.

I was always moving—mentally, emotionally, conversationally—one idea into the next, one distraction into another, never settling anywhere long enough for anything to fully reveal itself. If something felt slightly off, there was always something else to focus on. A new thought, a new plan, a new interpretation that made things just acceptable enough to continue.

It wasn’t denial.

It was momentum.

And momentum, it turns out, can be maintained if you structure your day correctly.

Coffee helps.

It keeps things moving. You sit there, engaged, talking, thinking—sharp enough to stay present, never deep enough for anything to land properly. Everything feels active, vaguely meaningful, just productive enough to justify continuing.

Alcohol helps in a different way.

Where coffee keeps things in motion, alcohol softens whatever might have required attention. It rounds the edges. Makes inconsistencies feel less urgent, less worth examining. You don’t need answers—you just need the situation to remain acceptable for a few more hours.

Between the two, you can maintain a very stable level of not-quite-awareness. Functional. Social. Mildly reflective, but never enough to interrupt anything.

I was very good at that balance—daytime clarity, evening tolerance. Neither particularly accurate.

If something felt good, that was enough. If something felt off, it probably just needed time. And if it kept feeling off—consistently, predictably, almost impressively so—then clearly I just hadn’t found the right angle yet.

I was remarkably cooperative with my own bad decisions. Not reckless, not impulsive—just accommodating. You don’t resist, you don’t question, you just keep going, quietly adjusting your expectations so they continue to fit whatever is happening.

Because I never really stopped, I never had to confront anything properly.

Everything just blended.

It worked, in its own way. Not because anything turned out well, but because I remained relatively undisturbed while things quietly failed around me.

Mindfuckness Without Meaning

At some point, the system stopped working.

Not dramatically. No collapse, no defining moment. Just a gradual shift—like something quietly recalibrated without asking for permission.

The movement slowed down just enough for things to become visible.

And that’s when the mindfuckness started.

Not the deep, philosophical kind that leads to growth or meaning. Nothing that resolves into anything useful. Just awareness. Constant, low-level, uninvited awareness.

Everything started to register.

Tone changes. Delays. Half-answers. Polite distance dressed up as independence. Conversations that drift instead of ending. Interest that almost forms, then quietly disappears before becoming anything you can point at.

It’s all there.

All the time.

And the problem isn’t that I see it.

The problem is that I understand it immediately.

There’s no delay anymore. No buffer. No space to reinterpret things into something softer or more optimistic.

Now it’s just recognition.

Which would be fine, if it stopped there.

But it doesn’t.

Because awareness doesn’t come with restraint. It doesn’t guide you away from bad decisions or protect you from repeating them. It doesn’t even slow you down in any meaningful way.

It just narrates.

You see the pattern. You recognise the outcome. And then, for reasons that remain unclear, you continue.

That’s the part no one really explains.

The upgrade doesn’t make you better.

It just makes you informed.

Which is significantly less impressive than it sounds.

Because now, instead of being an idiot unknowingly, you’re an idiot with context.

And once that settles in, it becomes difficult not to notice it everywhere.

Pure Idiotism

I’ve started thinking about what an idiot actually is.

Not in an insulting way.

More… structurally.

There seems to be a specific category that keeps appearing—pure idiotism. The clean kind. No hesitation, no doubt, just a complete, self-contained logic that somehow functions incorrectly.

I once watched an intern try to open a can.

A real can. A real can opener. Both present, both functional—and somehow not interacting in any meaningful way. They turned it in their hands, flipped it, adjusted the angle, paused to think. You could almost see the internal process happening, like they were trying to solve it conceptually instead of just opening the can.

They didn’t ask for help.

They didn’t question the approach.

They just committed to it.

It was fascinating.

Another one insisted the potatoes weren’t ready.

They were. The fork went through without resistance, which is generally considered a reliable indicator. There’s a kind of global agreement on this.

But no.

They were waiting for the peel to change colour, because they had only ever seen potatoes without peels. So in their mind, readiness wasn’t texture.

It was transformation.

Again—no questions.

Just complete confidence in a system that didn’t match reality.

That’s when it clicked.

Pure idiotism isn’t the absence of intelligence.

It’s the presence of a fully functioning explanation that simply doesn’t connect to what’s actually happening—and the refusal to interrupt it.

I would love to say I only observe this from a safe distance.

But that would be inaccurate.

Because I’ve done the emotional version of this. Repeatedly.

I’ve taken situations that clearly weren’t working and rotated them mentally, trying different angles, adjusting interpretations, convinced that at some point they would make sense.

That they would open.

I’ve sat in things where all available evidence suggested one outcome, and still waited for something else to happen—not because it was likely, but because it fit better with what I wanted to believe.

No questions asked.

No interruptions.

Just quiet commitment to the wrong conclusion.

Structurally, it’s not that different from the can.

The only real difference is that the intern didn’t know better.

And I did.

The Shitcom

At this point, it’s difficult not to see the same pattern everywhere.

My work life has fully transitioned into a shitcom.

Not quite a sitcom—those at least have timing and direction. This is slower, more deliberate, like everyone received the script but decided to interpret it independently, without coordination or concern for coherence.

We have meetings about things that already happened, follow-ups on conversations no one remembers, and action points that circulate endlessly without ever turning into action.

There’s always one person explaining something incorrectly with confidence, one person silently disagreeing but saying nothing, and the rest of us participating just enough to keep it going.

Occasionally something almost makes sense.

Everyone pauses, as if we’ve collectively noticed it.

Then it passes.

And we continue.

It’s not chaos.

It’s structured confusion.

Dry Squirrels

And dating, at this point, has become completely uninteresting.

Not tragic. Not disappointing. Just… irrelevant.

What’s left feels like the emotional equivalent of last summer’s dry squirrels. Not an established category, but it should be. Slightly frantic, vaguely unappealing, somehow still lingering long past their natural season.

You look at it and think:

weren’t you supposed to be gone by now?

There’s no curiosity left.

No anticipation.

Just a quiet awareness of how it will unfold, paired with a complete lack of interest in participating.

Real Time

I thought I missed you.

But I don’t.

I miss the version of me who could exist in all of this without commentary, without analysis, without the constant need to understand what is happening while it is happening.

Someone who could just be in it.

Wrong, probably.

But peaceful.

Now everything is visible.

And once you see it, there’s no elegant way back.

So you continue.

Fully aware.

I just miss being an idiot.

Now I get to watch it happen in real time.

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